“I have been complimented many times and they always
embarrass me; I always feel that they have not said enough.”
—Mark Twain

Blurbs

“that book is dead
sexy”—Xach on #lisp

“Peter Seibel offers a fresh view of Lisp and its
possibilities for elegantly solving problems. In Practical Common
Lisp, he gives enough basic information to let you quickly see the
power of the functional language paradigm. He then dazzles you with
examples that seem almost magical in their simplicity and power. This
read is pure fun from start to finish.”
—Gary Pollice,
from Dr.
Dobb's Portal, May 17, 2006 article on the 2006 Jolt
Awards

“Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp is just what
the title implies: an excellent introduction to Common Lisp for
someone who wants to dive in and start using the language for real
work. The book is very well written and is fun to read—at least
for those of us whose idea of fun extends to learning new programming
languages.

Rather than spending a lot of time on abstract discussion of
Lisp's place in the universe of programming lnaguages, Seibel dives
right in, guiding the reader through a series of programming examples
of increasing complexity. This approach places the most emphasis on
those parts of Common Lisp that skilled programmers use the most,
without getting bogged down in the odd corners of Common Lisp that
even the experts must look up in the manual. The result of Seibel's
example-driven approach is to give the reader an excellent
appreciation of the power of Common Lisp in building complex, evolving
software systems with a minimum of effort.

There are already many good books on Common Lisp that offer a
more abstract and comparative approach, but a good ‘Here's how you do
it—and why’ book, aimed at the working programmer, is a valuable
contribution, both to current Common Lisp users and those who should
be.” —Scott E. Fahlman, Research Professor of Computer
Science, Carnegie Mellon University

“This book shows the power of Lisp not only in the areas
that it has traditionally been noted for—such as developing a
complete unit test framework in only 26 lines of code—but also
in new areas such as parsing binary MP3 files, building a web
application for browsing a collection of songs, and streaming audio
over the web. Many readers will be surprised that Lisp allows you to
do all this with conciseness similar to scripting languages such as
Python, efficiency similar to C++, and unparalleled flexibility in
designing your own language extensions.” —Peter Norvig,
Director of Search Quality, Google Inc; author of
Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in
Common Lisp

“I wish this book had already existed when I started
learning Lisp. It's not that there aren't other good books about
(Common) Lisp out there, but none of them has such a pragmatic,
up-to-date approach. And let's not forget that Peter covers topics
like pathnames or conditions and restarts which are completely
ignored in the rest of the Lisp literature.

If you're new to Lisp and want to dive right in don't hesitate
to buy this book. Once you've read it and worked with it you can
continue with the ‘classics’ like Graham, Norvig, Keene, or
Steele.” —Edi Weitz, maintainer of
the Common Lisp Cookbook and author of CL-PPCRE regular
expression library.

“Experienced programmers learn best from examples and it
is delightful to see that Lisp is finally being served with Seibel's
example-rich tutorial text. Especially delightful is the fact that
this book includes so many examples that fall within the realm of
problems today's programmers might be called upon to tackle, such as
Web development and streaming media.—Philip
Greenspun, author of Software Engineering for Internet
Applications, MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science

“Practical Common Lisp is an excellent book that
covers the breadth of the Common Lisp language and also demonstrates
the unique features of Common Lisp with real-world applications that
the reader can run and extend. This book not only shows what Common
Lisp is but also why every programmer should be familiar with
Lisp.” —John Foderaro, Senior
Scientist, Franz Inc.

“The Maxima Project frequently gets queries from
potential new contributors who would like to learn Common Lisp. I am
pleased to finally have a book that I can recommend to them without
reservation. Peter Seibel's clear, direct style allows the reader to
quickly appreciate the power of Common Lisp. His many included
examples, which focus on contemporary programming problems,
demonstrate that Lisp is much more than an academic programming
language. Practical Common Lisp is a welcome addition to the
literature.” —James Amundson, Maxima
Project Leader

“I like the interspersed Practical chapters on 'real' and
useful programs. We need books of this kind telling the world that
crunching strings and numbers into trees or graphs is easily done
in Lisp.—Professor Christian Queinnec,
Universite Paris 6 (Pierre et Marie Curie)

“One of the most important parts of learning a
programming language is learning its proper programming style. This is
hard to teach, but it can be painlessly absorbed from Practical
Common Lisp. Just reading the practical examples made me a better
programmer in any language.” —Peter
Scott, Lisp programmer

“Finally, a Lisp book for the rest of us. If you want to
learn how to write a factorial function, this is not your book. Seibel
writes for the practical programmer, emphasizing the engineer/artist
over the scientist, subtly and gracefully implying the power of the
language while solving understandable real-world problems.

In most chapters, the reading of the chapter feels just like
the experience of writing a program, starting with a little
understanding, then having that understanding grow, like building the
shoulders upon which you can then stand. When Seibel introduced macros
as an aside while building a test framework, I was shocked at how such
a simple example made me really 'get' them. Narrative context is
extremely powerful and the technical books that use it are a cut
above. Congrats!” —Keith Irwin, Lisp
Programmer

“While learning Lisp, one is often refered to the CL
HyperSpec if they do not know what a particular function does,
however, I found that I often did not 'get it' just reading the
HyperSpec. When I had a problem of this manner, I turned
to Practical Common Lisp every single time—it is by far
the most readable source on the subject that shows you how to program,
not just tell you.” —Philip
Haddad, Lisp Programmer

“With the IT world evolving at an ever increasing pace,
professionals need the most powerful tools available. This is why
Common Lisp—the most powerful, flexible, and stable programming
language ever—is seeing such a rise in popularity. Practical
Common Lisp is the long-awaited book that will help you harness
the power of Common Lisp to tackle today's complex real world
problems.” —Marc Battyani, author of
CL-PDF, CL-TYPESETTING, and mod_lisp.

“Please don't assume Common Lisp is only useful for
Databases, Unit Test Frameworks, Spam Filters, ID3 Parsers, Web
Programming, Shoutcast Servers, HTML Generation Interpreters, and
HTML Generation Compilers just because these are the only things
happened to be implemented in the book
Practical Common Lisp.—Tobias C.
Rittweiler, Lisp Programmer

“When I met Peter, who just started writing this book, I
asked to myself (not to him, of course) ‘why yet another book on
Common Lisp, when there are many nice introductory books?’ One year
later, I found a draft of the new book and recognized I was wrong.
This book is not ‘yet another’ one. The author focuses on practical
aspects rather than on technical details of the language. When I first
studied Lisp by reading an introductory book, I felt I understood the
language, but I also had an impression ‘so what?’, meaning I had no
idea about how to use it. In contrast, this book leaps into a
‘PRACTICAL’ chapter after the first few chapters that explain the very
basic notions of the language. Then the readers are expected to learn
more about the language while they are following the PRACTICAL
projects, which are combined together to form a product of a
significant size. After reading this book, the readers will feel
themselves expert programmers on Common Lisp since they have
‘finished’ a big project already. I think Lisp is the only language
that allows this type of practical introduction. Peter makes use of
this feature of the language in building up a fancy introduction on
Common Lisp.” —Taiichi Yuasa,
Professor, Department of Communications and Computer Engineering,
Kyoto University

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